Parties are fun – there aren’t many people who would turn down attending a gathering with friends and food. However, if you’ve ever hosted a party yourself, you know that pulling everything together can be a hassle.

The good news is you can cut down on not only the amount of stress you, as host, might feel, but also the amount of stress on your wallet, by doing a few simple things.

One of those things is to let someone else take care of the food. You can get delicious ready-made platters from a variety of retailers, especially a Gatineau catering businesses.

If you’re on a budget, relying on a local Gatineau catering business to assemble plates of delicious appetizers and sandwiches for whatever you’re hosting – a baby shower, birthday, retirement party – is a great way to cut down on stress and cost.

Here are a few options that most Gatineau caterers will offer:

Sandwiches. Sandwiches are great party food: they’re easy to carry with one hand and they’re not messy. Plus, who doesn’t love sandwiches? Another benefit of having sandwiches is you can have a variety of kinds to suit even the pickiest tastes, such as tuna, egg salad, ham, cheese or cold cuts. Most Gatineau caterers will do platters of assorted sandwiches or they can also do platters of a single kind if requested.

Cheese. Cheese is always a popular party food, and with dozens of varieties to choose from, you really can’t go wrong. Some Gatineau caterers will do platters with gourmet cheeses for more upscale parties, and still others will do a meat and cheese combo plate with bread or crackers for the perfect plate of appetizers.

Fruit. For a healthy finger food, a fruit platter is a great option. A mix of in-season fruits like strawberries, mango, pineapple, blueberries, oranges or a dozen other options will be artfully arranged by professional Gatineau caterers to wow your guests. Throw in a chocolate fountain and you’ve got an inexpensive dessert option as well.

Dessert. Home-baking dessert for a crowd can take days, but ordering a dessert platter from a Gatineau caterer will be ready for you to pick up the day of your party with no stress or mess. They can include things like cookies, cheesecake, brownies or chocolate-dipped fruit.

Having a tall, white, fondant-covered wedding cake is a long-standing tradition, and so is the cake-cutting ceremony you perform as a newly married couple. However, recently a lot of brides have been breaking tradition and incorporating a little more fun in their wedding dessert of choice: cupcakes.

These days where brides are breaking tradition in just about every way imaginable – wearing coloured dresses, getting married outside instead of in a church and even seeing the groom before the wedding (gasp!) – it makes sense many women are also choosing to go an alternative route for their wedding cake.

If you think about it, cupcakes are a great option to feed a large crowd at weddings. Here are some of the reasons why cupcakes are steadily gaining ground as the popular choice:

Cost. The cost of wedding cakes is cringe-worthy, especially since you’ll only have it for a few hours before it’s devoured. Cupcakes, on the other hand, can be a much more affordable option.

Because it takes much less skill and time to decorate buttercream cupcakes than it does to assemble a four-tier cake covered in fondant and sugar flowers, you save money on labour costs. Also, you can order exactly as many as you need, instead of guessing serving sizes and ordering an extra tier just in case.

Easily feed a crowd. Gone are the days of guests having to wait in line for a slice of cake: with cupcakes, servers can just bring the individual little cakes right to the tables, making dessert much less of a hassle. If you find you really want to keep the cake-cutting tradition, get a tiny cake for you and your groom and cut that before you serve the cupcakes.

Variety. Getting multiple flavours of cake in a traditional cake is possible, but it’ll cost you. Getting multiple flavours with cupcakes, however, is a breeze. Vanilla, chocolate, red velvet, lemon – get as many flavours as you want!

Decorating. Since cupcakes are basically individual canvases for the decorators to work with, you have a lot more leeway with what they look like. You can incorporate your wedding colours – think yellow and blue frosted cupcakes, – your theme or whatever else you’d like without it looking gaudy or over the top. Let’s face it, a four-foot cake with yellow and blue frosting and starfish all over it might be a bit of an eyesore, but with smaller cupcakes, it’ll just look cute.